Aislinn Bowler is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre (SGDP) at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London.

Her role involves coordinating the Medical Research Council-funded project, ART-Transition, which aims to investigate the transition from adolescence to adulthood for people with ADHD and to develop a prototype for a new ADHD-transition smartphone app.

Before joining the SGDP, Aislinn completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, supervised by Professor Angelica Ronald and Professor Pasco Fearon.

Aislinn’s PhD research examined early motor skills and what they can tell us about later traits and conditions in later childhood and adolescence, such as ADHD and autism and educational attainment. Her methods included developing an app prototype to measure early motor skills in addition to polygenetic score and longitudinal behavioural analyses investigating fine motor skills and their associations with later traits.

Aislinn has held multiple previous research positions at UCL and the UCL Institute of Education, which have involved working with children with ADHD, adults with mental health conditions, and adolescents.

Research Interests

• Neurodevelopmental disorders

• Child and adolescent mental health

• Remote data collection

• Motor skills

Key Publications

Bowler, A., Arichi, T., Fearon, P., Meaburn, E., Begum-Ali, J., Pascoe, G., Johnson, M. H., et al. (2024). Phenotypic and Genetic Associations Between Preschool Fine Motor Skills and Later Neurodevelopment, Psychopathology, and Educational Achievement. Biological Psychiatry, Developmental Circuit Alterations in Autism and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, 95(9), 849–858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2023.11.017

Hewitt, S. R. C., Habicht, J., Bowler, A., Lockwood, P. L., & Hauser, T. U. (2023). Probing apathy in children and adolescents with the Apathy Motivation Index–Child version. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02184-4

Dubois, M., Bowler, A., Moses-Payne, M. E., Habicht, J., Moran, R., Steinbeis, N., & Hauser, T. U. (2022). Exploration heuristics decrease during youth. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 22(5), 969–983. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-022-01009-9

Habicht, J., Bowler, A., Moses-Payne, M. E., & Hauser, T. U. (2022). Children are full of optimism, but those rose-tinted glasses are fading—Reduced learning from negative outcomes drives hyperoptimism in children. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(8), 1843–1853. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001138

Bowler, A., Habicht, J., Moses-Payne, M. E., Steinbeis, N., Moutoussis, M., & Hauser, T. U. (2021). Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly. Cognition, 208, 104535. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104535

Moses-Payne, M. E., Habicht, J., Bowler, A., Steinbeis, N., & Hauser, T. U. (2021). I know better! Emerging metacognition allows adolescents to ignore false advice. Developmental Science, 24(5), e13101. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13101

Bach, D. R., Moutoussis, M., Bowler, A., Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network consortium, & Dolan, R. J. (2020). Predictors of risky foraging behaviour in healthy young people. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(8), 832–843. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0867-0

Farran, E. K., Bowler, A., D’Souza, H., Mayall, L., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Sumner, E., Brady, D., & Hill, E. L. (2020). Is the Motor Impairment in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) a Co-Occurring Deficit or a Phenotypic Characteristic? Advances in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 4(3), 253–270. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41252-020-00159-6

Farran, E. K., Bowler, A., Karmiloff-Smith, A., D’Souza, H., Mayall, L., & Hill, E. L. (2019). Cross-Domain Associations Between Motor Ability, Independent Exploration, and Large-Scale Spatial Navigation; Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Williams Syndrome, and Typical Development. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00225